ISR: Prof Richard Wilkinson 'The Psychological Costs of Inequality'

Edge Hill University, 5th April 2019
The Psychological Costs of Inequality
Prof Richard Wilkinson, University of Nottingham Medical School

I4P is delighted to welcome back Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of York.

This lecture lecture will focus on the psychological effects of large income differences between rich and poor. It will show how inequality undermines feelings of self-worth, damages social relationships, and contributes to the heavy burden of stress and mental illness in rich developed countries.

The material is taken from his and Kate Pickett’s new book, The Inner Level, which shows that inequality is not merely about economics and living standards but affects us all intimately, changing the nature of social life and reducing levels of confidence.

In an important sense, this new book describes some of the social and psychological processes which lead to the increased rates of health and social problems shown previously in Wilkinson and Pickett’s earlier book, The Spirit Level.

Organised by the Faculty of Health & Social Care and sponsored by I4P, this event takes place at Edge Hill University’s Ormskirk Campus.

Edge Hill University
5th April 2019

[Zapata]

I respect and admire Wilkinson very much. And I most grateful to him. Inequality is indeed the worst and most persistent of epidemias

[efortune]

Quotes and notes:
00:45 “I feel that one of the most important deficits in our understanding of the world is how we are affected by our social environment, the nature of the world we live in. And I think we get endless things wrong because we don’t understand the social processes we’re part of.
…inequality is much more fundamental a dimension of human society than I think we had realized at all. But as soon as you start looking at the data and thinking about the processes behind the data, it’s a bit like if you think about any animal, take some kind of monkey, the first question you should ask if you want to know about its social and sexual behavior is does it have a strong ranking system. It’s absolutely fundamental to the nature of the different organizations, how egalitarian or how hierarchical they are.”

10:45 (graph) bullying and inequality, research by Frank Elgar
“This is Frank Elgar looking at school bullying in 37 countries there. This is the proportion of 11 year olds who bullied others two or more times a month. Bullying is pretty serious. You see in even fairly crude data the very long term effects of having been bullied at school. But look at the scale of the differences. The percent down there, the bottom gap is nought (zero) to 5% of kids who’ve bullied others. And up at the top you’ve got around 20%. So huge differences in bullying related quite strongly to inequality. All these graphs I’m showing you, of course, statistically significant.

13:00 patents per capita lower in more unequal society
“We spent some time discussing how can we get a measure of creativity. And we thought we’d look at patents by head of population. And we found that there were marginally more patents per head of population in more equal countries. But since then a much bigger analysis has come out and it shows it’s really a pretty powerful relationship.

… and that makes a lot of sense. Those societies are less creative because I’ve already shown you they have more people in prison, but they also have more people with drug problems, they have more people, American data, dropping out of high school, they have lower maths and literacy scores in more unequal countries, lower social mobility. So in a sense what the picture that builds up is that countries are wasting their talent. That the damaging effects of inequality have very high human, and social or economic costs.”

14:00

***18:20 if you really want to increase social mobility

20:15 if you lived in a more equal society

26:00ish social status anxiety

28:30 threat experiment w Indian kids

31:00 mental illness

32:10 graph
Sherry Johnson at Berkeley on social dominance hierarchy
“The Dominance Behavioral System
Findings:-
-Anxiety and depression are related to subordination, to submissiveness and to the desire to avoid subordination.
-Disruptive behavior disorders, mania and narcissistic traits are related to inflated self-perceptions of power or a heightened focus on achieving social dominance and recognition.”

39:50 (graph)
(“Inequality increases conspicuous consumption and consumerism
-People in more unequal areas of the USA are more likely to buy high status cars
-People in more unequal US states and more unequal countries are more likely to buy status goods”)

42:50

43:50 (graph)
(“The Jekyll & Hyde of Public Health?
-Social Status (dominance hierarchies, pecking orders) are orderings based on power, coercion and privileged access to resources – regardless of the needs of others.
-Friendship in contrast, is based on reciprocity, mutuality, social obligations, sharing and a recognition of each others’s needs.)

45:00

***46:37 (graph)
(“Participation in local groups and voluntary organisations is lower in more unequal societies”)

“Lots of evidence that community life, civic participation weakens with more inequality. Trust goes down. People are less likely to feel that they can trust others. People are less helpful. All this comes from different studies. People are less helpful to each other in more unequal societies.

***46:55 (graph)
“You get these huge rises in violence. These are American states and Canadian provinces. You’ve got about tenfold differences in homicide rates there from 15 per million to 150 homicides per million. Very well established in lots of different settings around the world. But if you look at really much more unequal societies than the ones I’ve been showing you, go to places like Mexico or South Africa you’ll find it’s gone a stage further. People are afraid of each other there. They barricade their houses. They have bars on the windows and doors. Even the guide books tell you not to go out at night. It’s not safe.

So you lose the reciprocity of more equal societies, the helpfulness, the public spiritedness. And if you go far enough you end up with this kind of thing, or the same in South Africa. That’s an electric fence at the top and this says ‘Armed Response’.”

48:30 more unequal need more guard labor. USA at the top

49:30 q&a

49:45 What evidence has come over the last 10 years on inequality? Do people believe your work? Policy changes?

52:00 we could all save money by dealing w inequality

53:15 “I can’t remember which historian it was I was reading, he talks about The New Deal in the 1930s, Roosevelt, and he said it wasn’t the figures on unemployment and so on that lead change. It was the wildcat strikes, the riots, the disorder which he said put the fear of God into them. And of course Roosevelt sold it to the rich by saying that we need to reform in order to preserve. And I think that they did feel, that with the rise of Communism they were really afraid of where the system went, maybe going, or would go.

***54:04 “I think people are extraordinarily bad at understanding these links. When the Mental Health Foundation came out with that report about high levels of stress, and similar things come out every now and then, about a number of girls self-harming, awful figures that seem to move gradually upwards, everyone talks about we need more services. And they hardly talk at all about why we are all in this mess. And so they think about individual strategies approaching the individual. That’s why I started off by saying I think what we’ve got to do is learn about how we are influenced by the broader structure of social relations we are a part of.

And of course, the current concern with knife crime is rather similar. I haven’t heard inequality mentioned once. But there are 60 or more papers on inequality and violence. The first came out in the 1970s. So it’s very well established. I don’t know whether they don’t want to think or can’t get to grips with structural determinants.


***58:25 “I think why it’s really important is if the economists are right, artificial intelligence, automation is going to, if it’s right to think that it’s a threat to a third, half of all our jobs, then it’s really important that that isn’t a disaster by throwing so many people out of work and making the people own the machinery super rich. We need to redistribute income and work. In a way it’s the biggest choice in front of us, whether automation is an absolute curse for our society or whether it’s the greatest blessing because we really liberated a large proportion of the population from all this business of not having time with kids, and friends, and family, and so on.”

1:02:00 don’t think we can get unions back since manufacturing is gone. Need to democratize the work place